There are a number of questions we need to answer to decide if we need a library data collection instead of one of the built-in collections:
- Is the structure a buffer between the producer and the consumer? Does some part of the algorithm produce data items and another part consume the data items?
A common naive approach is for the producer to accumulate items in a list, and then the consumer processes the items from the list. This approach will tend to build a large intermediate data structure. A change in focus can interleave production and consumption, reducing the amount of memory used:
- A queue is used for First-In-First-Out (FIFO) processing. Items are inserted at one end and consumed from the other end. We can use ...
